


Being an Account of A Natural Philosopher's Journey

by genarti



Category: Maleficent (Disney Movies)
Genre: I would say this is an AU where Conall revives, M/M, Original Scholar With Extremely Foolish Hot Takes, Post-Canon, but given canon I think that's more just a plausible epilogue, fake magical 19C-style scientific observation, need not be bad but this fellow's is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:01:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28142793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti/pseuds/genarti
Summary: "Hmm." Borra's back was tense and his wings half-lifted, but the look he shot Shrike was very dry. "So you find the human funny."She grinned back, all teeth. "Hilarious.""Drop him off a mountaintop if he ceases to be." He clapped her on the shoulder and stalked away.
Relationships: Borra/Conall (Disney)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 11
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Being an Account of A Natural Philosopher's Journey

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bakcheia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bakcheia/gifts).



_[...] Three large Fae accosted me when I reached the far bank of the glittering brook. Perhaps I came upon them by chance, but I think it likelier that this small stream is of some significance to their primitive, wild culture, and that by crossing it I have at last truly crossed not merely into the Moorlands, but into their world. What wonders must lie beyond, given what I have already seen!_

_The three sniffed and pawed at me, speaking in low growls that sounded very nearly like words. No wonder the folk of Ulstead believe that the higher Fae can speak in human tongues! The rational mind of a natural philosopher, of course, is not prey to such superstition. No, indeed, my understanding of the Western dialects is more than tolerable enough to have won me friends throughout my travels in this region, as previous chapters have shown. I have, upon occasion, had difficulty with the local accent—in the interests of intellectual rigor, I will own that that difficulty is well-nigh omnipresent, and that the quaint locals seem to have occasional difficulty in understanding me—but rest assured, I am certainly able to grasp when words are being said to me! Yet I have heard locals chattering away with the fairies, giving every evidence that they fully believe themselves to be having a real and mutual conversation. Alas for the peasant mind, led astray by old wives' tales and a superstitious awe of the Moorlands!_

_No, the truth of what I experienced is clear. They were engaging in a sort of social grooming practice: rough, clumsy, and welcoming. I did my best to reciprocate, but was shaken off; no doubt I do not quite have the knack of it, not to mention my lack of claws. In any case, they spent several minutes digging through my pockets and bags and making sounds together; one even found my notebook, and flipped through the pages, turning it to the others and making sounds uncannily like a growling sort of laughter. At last, they let me go upon my way, thoroughly groomed, across the sacred border of the Golden Brook, and (I can only believe) accepted as one of their own!_

\-- Excerpt from _Being an Account of A Natural Philosopher's Journey Through the Wild Moorlands, By Way of Ulstead, Loristead, Linnisfair and Riverdale and Divers Small Lands, Including His Observations on the Fae, Sprites and Fairy-Folk Who Dwell Therein,_ by Johannis Carfordius (John Carford)

* * *

"Shrike."

"Hmm?"

Borra nodded toward the bushes. They rustled. "What is _that_ doing here?"

Shrike flared her wings in exasperation, but her lips twitched. Borra knew her more than well enough to read her mood, she knew—had they not been friends for half his long lifetime now, since the day he had stumbled into her beloved, long-lost mountain pass, his wings caked with blood and desert dust? "Are we not making peace, Borra?"

He growled, low in his throat. The faint sound of scribbling from the bushes increased in both speed and fervor. "Humans crouching in the bushes in the heart of the Moors? Is that what peace is to be?" The last words were snarled towards the hidden human. The human didn't budge, but several toadstool folk decided that sidling further out of the way might be prudent. Shrike's young niece Callista, who had been playing with them, looked up wide-eyed.

Shrike stepped nearer, to put a soothing hand on his arm and speak lower into his ear. "Three of our warriors already checked him for weapons and stolen magic. So did the ivy fairies he tried to take a nap on. He seems like a harmless idiot, and one easy to steer. If we let the twit lurk in bushes a bit pretending he's stealthy, haven't we shown our goodwill to little cost? Isn't that Conall's fine diplomacy?"

"Hmm." Borra's back was tense and his wings half-lifted, but the look he shot her was very dry. "So you find the human funny."

She grinned back, all teeth. "Hilarious."

"Drop him off a mountaintop if he ceases to be." He clapped her on the shoulder and stalked away. Three steps, and then branches rattled in the sudden sharp downdraft as he took to the skies.

* * *

_I have often seen the winged Fae atop the great rocky heights of this land. This will come as no surprise to the reader, if he but stops and thinks for a moment, for do not birds love treetops and cliff faces?_

_There are two dominant males among the winged group, aside from the solitary matriarch who comes and goes. Strangely, they seem to be on quite good terms; a greater Fae, it seems, is not like a stallion or a troll-dog! They may spar for dominance now and again, to no clear conclusion to my eyes, but more often they show quite the friendliest disposition with quite the prettiest friendship towards one another. I have named a few of these Fae in my mind and my notes, for ease of memory. The quiet one I call Timothy, the rather scruffy fellow I call Robert, and the matriarch is Isadora. Whence the names? Only a silly fancy of mine: Timothy and Robert were school-fellows of mine who looked a little like, and Isadora is of course from the poem by our great national bard._

_Timothy scales often to those perilous heights, and may be seen on many a day, perched atop a great promontory. At length another of his kind will go to him, be it one or a group; much of the time, it is Robert who seeks him out. Up on those silent heights, they will sit together in the prettiest amity. Did I not know from Pliny the Elder that the great Fae are born of vapors from the earth after a heavy rainfall and a dead child's curse, I would wonder if they, like birds, built aeries atop such cliffs. Perhaps they, like snakes and lizards, must warm themselves in the sun, and from a sort of avian instinct seek to do so as close to that celestial fire as they can._

_Would that I might scale these heights and observe them from a closer distance! They are elusive, these Fae, for all that they have taken me in. It takes all the scholarly judgment I possess to fill in the gaps in my understanding, and there are matters of their behavior that science may never truly understand, unless fairies learn to speak!_

\-- Excerpt from _Being an Account of A Natural Philosopher's Journey Through the Wild Moorlands, By Way of Ulstead, Loristead, Linnisfair and Riverdale and Divers Small Lands, Including His Observations on the Fae, Sprites and Fairy-Folk Who Dwell Therein,_ by Johannis Carfordius (John Carford)

* * *

The sight of the Moors unrolling across the valley still struck Conall silent, after all these months. Sometimes with the similarity to the far-off forest he had been born and fledged in, and the unexpected joy of standing again under trees with sunlight on his wings and the air fresh and clean and free around him; sometimes, instead, with all the tiny differences: this type of flower fairy absent, that one present, a crow jeering with a Moors accent, a strange smell on the breeze.

For so long, they had lived near the Moors, but always in hiding, always under cover of rock or night, always buried in fear. And now, he could stand in the sun-drenched forest or fly through a clear noon sky, free.

Not fearless, yet. He had too many years of habit, and too many scars, and too much grief for that. He had woken in a tangle of fading tomb blooms, but before that he had died in iron, and the fact that he had no regrets did not make the memory of the agony any lighter. But he was free, they all were; everything else would come.

Conall let his mind drift, sitting high atop a rocky upthrust, his wings half spread. Around him rose the sounds of the Moors. Below, the land rolled forth in glowing greens and golds, patchworked with silver drifts of fog, richly veined with the wandering river and its tributaries and brooks and pooling lakes. It had rained all morning, but now the sky was washed clean and blue, and the lingering damp patches were only in shadowed dells. Over a stand of goldsilk trees, a flock of prickle-birds wheeled and squabbled. 

This high up, there was a breath of coolness to the air as it ruffled his wings and brushed his cheeks. Autumn was on the way, and with it, the first stirrings of the urge to migrate. Perhaps someday again it would be safe to follow the warmth through the skies as his ancestors had, as his instincts urged. Not since Conall's earliest childhood had he been able to move with the seasons, and even then it had been cautious, fearful and circumscribed, fraught with danger. Joyful too, though—the joy of knowing two homes, paired halves of a whole. He had made friends with human children there as a fledgling, long and long ago; their parents had watched him with wary, fearful eyes. Then the boy (what had his name been?) had sprained his ankle, and his parents had chased Conall off with stones and shouts that he had laid a curse on their son. Conall wondered if the children still lived, if they remembered the brash fey-child fondly or thanked their gods now for sparing them a demon's friendship.

Long ago, now.

It was Borra who flew up to join him on the mountaintop eventually, of course. For so long they had been mewed up in the caves and magic-carved nestlands that were both prison and refuge, slipping out only to find food or scout after the humans. It was a comfort to know that with a wider world for both of them to lose themselves in, Borra would still be there, as reliable and irritable as ever.

Conall's feathers ruffled in the gust as Borra backwinged to a landing in front of him. He said nothing, only stood, tall and broad, staring down at Conall. He had never shed his warrior's leathers, though his face was clean of paint. He looked, as he often did, half a wingbeat off from his surroundings: desert-dried, in a warrior's straps and bands, prickly and ready to anger, here on this gentle sun-drenched summit in the green Moors. Borra was not a fey made for ease, and that made it the more precious when he could be persuaded to find some.

There was dust in his hair again. How did he even manage that, on a rainy day in a gentle forest?

Conall gestured toward the ground in front of his feet, inviting. Borra rolled his eyes a little, fond in spite of himself, and settled. 

The afternoon was quiet; there was no meeting, no urgency, no cause for Borra to snap out some swift statement or grandstand for their people. Only the warmth of his wings and back against Conall's shins, and the magic-thick air of the Moors in both their lungs, and the gabbling of fire-toads among the rocks. One of them would speak when he had something to say. In the meantime, they had this comfortable silence, and Borra's hair and feathers sliding between Conall's fingers in companionable preening.

Predictably, at length, it was Borra who spoke. "I spoke to the human queen today."

"Mm?"

"She intends to invite humans to the autumn solstice."

"Mm."

Borra made a noise deep in his chest. "You already knew?"

"No. But it makes sense."

Borra growled again, more distinctly this time. "She's too human."

"She is human." Conall flicked free a puff of loose down and carded his fingers again through the newly tidy feathers there, idly enjoying the steady heat of the skin below. Dark fey ran hot in any case, compared to humans and to many of the other large fairies, but the desert was in Borra's bones; he always felt like a sun-warmed rock. "And yet all the same, Maleficent raised her as her own."

"Not the rest of them."

"No. But if they don't know us, they can only fear us. If we are to know real peace between our peoples, we must learn to share our joys."

Borra twisted around just enough to fix him with a level stare on him. "Are you telling me, Conall, that you enjoy the thought of humans among us at the solstice?"

"You don't even care about the solstice," Conall protested. 

It was true; it was also not the point. Borra did not even dignify the weak deflection with a response. Instead of pointing out that Conall, unlike Borra's long-dead desert kin, cared a great deal about the solstice bonfires and midair dancing under the moon, he only stared with flat exasperation.

Conall sighed, feeling it gust out of him like the mountain breeze itself. "Of course I don't," he admitted. He would not say this to the queen, and probably not to Maleficent, whose temper flared like the phoenix-fire in her veins and did not need the encouragement of others' grudges to add to her own. But Borra knew him, through and through. "Relax into a solstice dance, with humans in the circle below? There's no festivity in that. But whether I like it isn't important. Would they like having us at their celebrations? They must learn to, and we must, too. The queen is right to invite a trusted few."

"She's too human," Borra muttered, "and you're too soft." But it was resigned; all the bitter fire had gone out of him now.

"Maybe," Conall agreed, meaning _no, I'm right,_ and knowing that Borra would hear it correctly. "What did you tell her?"

Borra drew up a leg and glared out at the horizon. It glittered, serene and immune. "That it had better be few, and trusted, and we would look to be sure they had no iron nor worse. You're rubbing off on me."

"Good," Conall said. Borra snorted, nearly silently, and Conall found himself smiling briefly. "I mean your precautions. They're wise."

"Let's hope they're enough."

"They will be."

* * *

_Alas! all fair times, and all sojourns of philosophical inquiry, must come to an end. My sojourn among the fairies of the wild Moors was drawing to a close, though I did not know it until it occurred. On a crisp autumn day, sometime after the solstice (which, despite local legend, I may say with great certainty is not celebrated by a single fairy, for I saw neither calendar nor party gathering in all my time among them; nor in fact did I spot a single fairy anywhere upon the night of the solstice, from which I conclude that, far from festivity, they hold that night in a superstitious terror)—as I say, some days later, I came upon the opening to a great cave. Some trick of the local magic obscured it, for I am an observant fellow by nature and by training, and yet even I did not spot this cave until I was nearly upon it, although it was large enough for me to stand upright in the entrance, and broad enough that I could have stretched out my arms to either side and yet not touched earth. The interior walls were marked by twisting lines, as if it had been carved by pure magic, and polished by the air of many passing wings._

_What wonders lay within I cannot say. I can only speculate: the breeding grounds, where the winged Fae lay their eggs? The den of a great dragon, perhaps even the one who landed upon the Queen of Ulstead last year? An endless enchanted maze, from which these kind-hearted and gentle creatures wished to preserve me?_

_Some later voyager may learn the truth of this place, but I fear that I did not. No sooner had I stepped into the cave mouth (and, I confess, exclaimed in astonishment and felt about for the measuring cord I carry with me always for just such occasions) than I heard a great rush and clatter of wings, and I found myself knocked sprawling, struck full in the chest by two hard taloned feet. My green waistcoat will never be the same._

_The Fae who had struck me down was the female I have mentioned in prior passages, sharp young Felicity who always seems amused by something, at least in my presence. She was looking quite astonishingly fierce in that moment. And then, the most astonishing thing: she uttered a sound which, if I were even a hair more credulous than my scientific discipline demands, I would have been convinced was the word, "Nope." No wonder the peasants of this land believe that the fairies speak their language fluently, and can converse even as you and I!_

_Even I, man of scholarly rationalism that I am, gaped for a credulous moment before my knowledge of the world reasserted itself. In that moment, she strode forward and seized my arm. Her grip was very strong, her nails sharp, and I found myself very conscious of the size and strength of her wings._

_I will not bore my readers with the ignominious details of the next little span, but the long and short of it is that I found myself escorted firmly to the borders of their land, and released at the edge of the great river that marks the boundary between the Moors and Ulstead. "Had I done something to offend these beautiful creatures?" I asked myself, and answered myself, "Johannis, you are committing an error of logic; you assume human offense and human reason. Always before they have welcomed you. Do not fall now into the trap of assumptions. Perhaps the mating season has come upon them, or perhaps in their simple, enchanted way they understood that your time among them has reached its end."_

_And so I determined to leave the Moorlands, in whose mists I had learned so much, and to journey to the great city of Talian before the winter snows. A part of my heart will always remain in its golden valleys, and with its gentle creatures who saw, in their simple way, that I strove only to understand them!_

\-- Excerpt from _Being an Account of A Natural Philosopher's Journey Through the Wild Moorlands, By Way of Ulstead, Loristead, Linnisfair and Riverdale and Divers Small Lands, Including His Observations on the Fae, Sprites and Fairy-Folk Who Dwell Therein,_ by Johannis Carfordius (John Carford)

* * *

"Hey, Callista."

"Hmm?"

Prickle the boulder-sprite flopped backwards onto the riverbank. Talking was easier this way; all the dark fey were much taller than a young boulder-sprite, even a gangly half-grown one like Callista, and if she lay flat she didn't have to crane her neck to see her friend's face. Plus, this way she got a nice comfy coating of mud all down her back. "What ever happened to the stupid human?"

"The scribbly one?"

"Yeah!" Prickle giggled, thinking again of his foolish human face. "I kind of liked him. He didn't know how to talk right, but he always acted so impressed when I told him stories."

Callista dropped into a crouch next to her. "Aunt Shrike got _mad_ ," she said in a conspiratorial whisper. "He tried to come into the caves we used to have to live in. Right after the solstice, too. She said he stopped being funny."

Prickle's eyes went wide at the end of their stalks. "Did you _eat_ him?"

"What? No! Why would we eat him?"

"You eat meat!"

"We don't eat humans!" Callista pulled a horrible face. "Even if we did, I bet he probably tastes horrible."

"Not any of you eat humans? Not even your Aunt Shrike or Mr. Borra?"

"Not even Maleficent. I'm pretty sure. But _definitely_ not anybody else. Nobody ate him unless a bear did. Aunt Shrike sent him back home across the river."

Prickle considered that. "Good," she declared, after some rumination. "He can tell other people my stories."

Callista looked dubious. "Do you think he'll tell them right?"

"Nope," said Prickle cheerfully. "But that's okay. I told them to him wrong anyway, just in case."

They burst into laughter. High above, out of earshot and wheeling over the trees in a lazy, habitually protective watch, Borra smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> I had so much fun writing this -- thank you, Bakcheia, and I hope you enjoy! Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Thank you so much to my betas Ryfkah and thewickedlady! There's a fine line between laughing at this self-absorbed naturalist who's very bad at his self-appointed job (which, let me be clear, I had lots of fun doing), and treading accidentally a little too close to echoing real historical racists; I tried very hard to stay on the correct side of that line, and thank you to both my betas for helping me with that. If I slipped up at any point, my apologies, and that's on me.


End file.
